


Falling Down

by Nvos



Category: League of Legends
Genre: Blood and Gore, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-15
Updated: 2018-03-15
Packaged: 2019-03-31 19:12:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13981527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nvos/pseuds/Nvos
Summary: As the Captain of the Guard, it is Irelia Lito's duty to keep Ionia safe even from forces working within. As the Golden Demon, it is Khada Jhin's magnum opus to tear away order wherever his art touches.





	Falling Down

**Author's Note:**

> If you read this title and summary and think "I've read this before", well, you may have! This is a torn down rewrite of an old and not at all finished fanfiction of mine from around the year ago which I've deleted as existing chapters are going to be so heavily edited that leaving it up would be misleading. As a note, this work features heavy depictions of gore and other unsettling themes, so should not be read by the faint of heart. Also noteworthy is that my interpretation of Khada Jhin differs heavily from canon which will be explored throughout this work.

Washed clean are the fields that lie empty. Bleached ferns wisp back and forth in an invisible wind, stars long along the horizon despite that the sun hangs at noon. An old oak tree is dying; on the precipice of the snow-white cliff, its gnarled shadow shading a silhouette. The sight of it, framed by the dissonance of the scenery, brings despair even to the Captain of the Guard’s famous iron stomach.  
  
“Zelos,” is the whisper, but he precludes any introduction.  
  
A voice, tangentially related to the silhouette but disembodied somewhere between it and Irelia, replies. “I’m dead, you know.”  
  
“No.” She winces. “You’re not. Not until I know the truth.”  
  
“I’m dead, sister.” The silhouette comes closer to the oak. “They got me.”  
  
She sighs, sitting on the very edge of the cliff. Should she look down, she would see that her legs are bloated twice their size, but she does not. Her hands, on the other hand, have twelve fingers each— that she doesn’t ignore.  
  
Irelia looks behind her. “You and I buried Father.” The silhouette has no face. “I’m going to bury you, too.”  
  
The void in the face laughs, dry and horrible. “How long has it been since that promise?”  
  
“Ten years since it started, four years since it ended.”  
  
“That’s a long time not to be dead.”  
  
Irelia’s eyes narrow. “I died too, you know.”  
  
“But you got back up.” The void bends to the right, further than any neck should crane. “Guess you’re a little more special than me.”  
  
Her cheeks purple. “I wasn’t the one who decided anything. Someone else did. I don’t know why. I haven’t… spoken to her.”   
  
“What kind of person doesn’t talk to her savior?” The silhouette twists around to the left, shape now only in the impression of being humanoid. “What, do you feel bad?”  
  
“You’re not Zelos.” She turns her head to the noon stars. “I’m dreaming.”  
  
“What an odd way to deflect a question, sister. I’m dead, after all.”  
  
 _“Stop saying that!”_  
  
Silence, before the silhouette mutters. Irelia turns back; it’s grown a face.  
  
But it’s not his.  
  
“You know,” it hisses, “You don’t talk to me that much, either. I deserve a little _‘hello’_ every now and again.”  
  
Her teeth bare through her grimace. “I don’t need to sleep. Not when you and all the other nightmares dog me.”  
  
“Huh…” The face extends, looking at the dying oak. Its body long and needlelike, full of shadow and limbless yet for a single dagger hand. It reaches forward and the dagger slices through a drooping branch, turning it to ash.   
  
“Everyone is dead,” it murmurs. “Even when they’re alive.”  
  
The length of three men now, the face glances at Irelia. “Do you know who I am?”  
  
“You’re using that man’s face,” she declares, “But you’re not him either.”  
  
It grins at her from cheek to cheek. “That’s interesting. What do you think about me?”  
  
“You’re a nightmare.”  
  
“But I’m yours.”  
  
In an instant the face convulses and new flesh replaces it. First it is Zelos, then Father, then Karma, and then, finally, Irelia.   
  
“Yours,” it screams. “Yours! Yours! Yours!”

* * *

  
She woke up while a door forced its way open.  
  
Down went the clatter of shoes on hardwood. A slide, previewed by a gasp and frantic wheezing. Steep aside the walls and slunk through the hallway: rush, rush, rush, rush. Red skin and chapped knees.   
  
Irelia Lito was there, whole and in part. Back against the covers, head to the ceiling with arms strung over her chest. Her skin her own; her mouth, her callused hands, the pulsation of Master Lito’s blade— all hers. Yet her body, even with her eyes flung open by nightmare never drew for real rest, never balked at a tear in her skin or a pop in her joints. None of it differed since the day she rose again on the fields of the Placidium. Her fear, greater than the nightmare she just experienced, was that it never would.  
  
When Meiji stormed her bedroom, she reminded herself to blink.  
  
“C-captain,” he rasped, near breathless. “Captain Irelia—"  
  
“What is it?” She sounded oddly tame.  
  
“Outside. Outside. Please, you have to come quick,” was the wheeze.   
  
No longer tame, she stood at full attention. “ _Meiji,_ ” she started, marching past him. “What is it? Are we under attack?”  
  
“No, no.” His face a blistering shade of red. Irelia did not want to know for how long he had been running. “Not that.”  
  
Breathing shorter, he leaned on a wall for support. “Captain Irelia, it’s… it’s…”  
  
Her face darkened.  
  
“The Golden Demon.”  
  
She was running now, too.  
  
The decorum she toppled as she went mattered little. It mattered even less that she was in evening dress and sandals. Her silver hair hung like a vise to the back of her neck as it rebuked the wind and belted against her pace. Hands clutched on her obi, Irelia met the dawn of the Placidium and sprinted along its cobblestones. Didn’t flinch, didn’t so much as guess what could be waiting for her. Only her, her speed, and the morning bells clanging on the horizon of Navori’s towering hills.  
  
“Meiji!” She shouted behind her. “Where are we going?”  
  
“The central gardens!”  
  
Irelia managed faster; by the time her breath so much as hitched, Khada Jhin’s handiwork stopped her cold.  
  
She knew it first from the stench than from the view. It reached into her throat and wrestled with her gut, ribbing hard enough to force her to cover her nose with a sleeve and resist gagging from her mouth. Nowhere else would she have sniffled hints of lavender and vanilla in the same inhale as an overpowering backdrop of rotting flesh and lesioned corpses. Disgust hurled way into her veins and she wasn’t even _looking_ at it.   
  
When Irelia finally picked up her head and confronted it, she wished instantly that she didn’t.  
  
It was tall; ivory roots protruded from the ground and filtered back up to create the shape of a towering spire. Confidence and _pride_ oozed from every etch in the marble, supposed by partially transmuted organs and limbs. It poised itself as if it had always been here, surrounded by the garden square’s otherwise breathtaking flora. A permanent fixture that, endowed with the heads of victims stuck to white spears, fanned out to a patch of red spider lilies on the earth beneath. Scraps of black and red covered what little remained of their arms and faces, ligaments rough with sigils Irelia recognized.  
  
She was staring at wanton murder— and wanton murder was staring her back, all but _begging_ her to call it a work of art.  
  
Steadying herself, she called out to her men. “What happened here?” She gestured at it. “Where has the Demon gone?”  
  
Meiji reached her, keeled over. A lack of breath had now been exchanged for succumbed with horror. He pulled up just to shake his head and turn away. Bile lay out in pools on the outskirts of the thing, easing nothing of the sight nor its stench.  
  
“Guardsmen on duty… reported that they heard bells ringing— not Navori’s bells— then… singing. Thought it a morning chorus, but it broke to awful screaming… Rushed over and caught only glimpses of the Demon and a group of people…”  
  
He coughed, swallowing something yellow. “… Then the Demon disappeared and _this_ was in its place.”  
  
She continued to stare.  
  
 _That’s impossible._ The Demon was a man. The late Master Kusho proved it so years ago. He was made of the same bone and blood that was now twisted before her. He was not capable of teleportation, or bringing these works of terror into spontaneity. He took time. The time necessary that meant he had never once attacked somewhere as rife with the Guard as the Placidium.  
  
The spire kept gaping.  
  
Master Lito’s blade a sizzle underneath her fingers, Irelia began the approach. The terror was easily a single story in length, in its shadow the yawning sun. Among the entanglement of gore, she presumed at least twenty made it whole, maybe more than thirty. She did not think for very long on what was lurking within the thorns and spider lilies.  
  
Then, looking down, she spotted something different: a scroll, neatly laid on the grass.  
  
“Was this left here?”  
  
Meiji snapped awake. “The what?”  
  
“This scroll, Meiji.” Straight as an arrow.  
  
“None of us left any papers…”  
  
Irelia’s lips peeled to reveal a grimace. Steps long and careful, she grabbed the scroll and stole it before the smell could assail her any further.   
  
“These men are wearing the outfit of the Order of Shadow,” she said as she unraveled it. It was lean, parchment clean and emblazoned with a golden seal of wax.  
  
She began to read. Meiji spoke but her world was momentarily silent.  
  
Elegant, crisp and primp were the characters with fine ink a shade of brilliant saffron, and they told her:  
  
 _‘Addressed to the surprising thorn in my side:_  
 _I beseech you, Captain, to think better of me._  
 _I’ve heard everything you’ve flung, every last little word and curse. I promise you the creativity in those is nothing impressive._  
 _If you’re set on condemning me a monster, I ask you this—_  
 _Would a monster ask you for a dance?_  
 _Yours,_  
 _Khada Jhin’_  
  
“Captain, the bodies. Captain, are you listening?”  
  
The paper crushed in her hand.  
  
“Burn it.”  
  


* * *

  
Great doors of the Council snapping shut, Irelia felt more uncomfortable in the presence of the Council than an open battlefield.   
  
“And you, the _Captain of the Guard_ , aren’t prepared to face a single consequence of what has happened?”  
  
The voice belonged to the man at the apex of the amphitheater, owning a rough face and sallow cheeks that fashioned him a scowl even if he ever tried to smile, hair coming off in shallow waves, brown as soil and nearly as ruddy. When he went, the rest stopped or risked being stopped.  
  
Elder Nomur could count himself among the men Irelia couldn’t be less happy to see, save for Khada Jhin.  
  
Irritation quickly found her but she resisted it and the knot in her stomach to survey the rest of the attendees. Glowers casted wherever she looked save for the seat of Duchess Karma for whom only frowned. Trepidation wriggling on her spine, she finally met the eyes of Nomur. Calling for a battalion of her own men, Irelia was a hero among her people. She fought to the bitter end and kept going with the blessing of a Celestial.   
  
“The Demon has declared war for what he sees as a personal slight.”  
  
Here in the company of fellow Elders, Irelia was brought back to a time where she was the girl that ruefully reported a torn dress to her father after tripping over a vacant tree limb.  
  
Nomur, true to nature, was out for blood. “A personal slight waged by you, Captain. The letter, in your name. But the Demon walks.”  
  
Her lips tightened. “Just what are you implying, Elder Nomur?”  
  
His arms folded. “How long is it now until the Demon is allowed to take the innocent lives of those who thought themselves safe in the Placidium?”  
  
“He is not allowed to do anything, Elder Nomur! That thing he made, it involved no citizen of the Placidium! The bodies, I identified them as being from the Order of Shadow.”   
  
Nomur chuffed, coming down like a blade to her gullet. “I see… how do you figure the Demon transports bodies from the Order of Shadow— days away from here, mind— all the way to the Placidium with no-one noticing until this morning? Please, Captain, tell me you have some understanding of our country’s geography.”  
  
Master Lito’s blade sharply pulsed. Irelia swallowed it the same as she did her dignity. “We are investigating,” she said. “We think it the work of a complex spell.”  
  
“As is customary.” His voice flattened with derision. “Let us know at the Council what we should release to the public after you glean from the ash, Captain.”  
  
Finally Karma spoke. “Elder Nomur, the Dawning Festival.”  
  
Nomur, suddenly lax, simply shrugged. “What of it, Elder Karma? I think I speak for the rest of the Council when I say it cannot go on. If the Demon can walk from his Zhyun mountains and leave behind an assemblage of corpses, it’s foolhardy to think he’d pass on an opportunity to strike while the moment is hot.”  
  
Irelia tensed. “The Guard’s duty is to keep the Placidium and all of Ionia safe, Elder Nomur. He feeds on fear. All of you know this. He’s certainly been dining well since he escaped Tuula a decade ago thanks to such suggestions of cowardice. We give him what he wants and he’ll find a different way in.”  
  
Nomur’s brow went up. “Starling voice of reason as always, Captain. What if the Guard fails to stop him? The dead will be on your hands.”  
  
The sizzle of Master Lito’s blade grew only louder. Irelia exhaled.  
  
“Elder Nomur, I appreciate your aged opinion,”  
  
She flicked her fingers and the blades manifested.  
  
“But that won’t happen.”


End file.
